


Said the Joker to the Thief

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: Withnail & I (1986)
Genre: Drinking, Drugs, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 21:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I wonder why I'm here, a passive audience to your self-destruction.</i> A Withnail character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Said the Joker to the Thief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pocketedwocket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketedwocket/gifts).



> Contains quite a bit of drug use. Also, please forgive the unconventional style.

You’re in a pub in Camden town. You’re telling everybody in a quavery, broken toff’s voice that you’ve just finished a ten-week run as Mercutio. I find out later that you are lying, that you haven’d had any work since a turn you did in a seaside panto eight months ago. You were sacked for falling to your knees and vomiting over the side of the stage, splattering the front row with your liquid lunch. You’re wearing an exquisite sports coat with frayed elbows and a dark stain on the front. You’re thin to the point of emaciation and your unwashed hair is combed straight back. 

Fuck you, you quivering pack of turds, you say to nobody and everybody. I’ll have you know that this wine is utter swill. Wine slops over the edge of your glass and into your scuffed handmade shoes. 

It’s cold, and London is grey and wet and blurry. It is nineteen sixty-eight and everything, to me, seems to be falling apart in slow motion. When I sit in cafes and waiting rooms the radio plays “Hey Jude”. My flatmate, a set dresser from the BBC who downs a gin and tonic every morning before work, plays “All Along The Watchtower” every night on repeat, blowing smoke from sloppy loosely-rolled joints at the ceiling.

Everything is noise and change, and I begin to keep a diary. I think a lot. The lumpen, pasty faces of the people in the cafes and pubs begin to frighten me. I have bit part in “Eastenders” and the cheque, when it comes, keeps me in beer and four greasy walls around my head and not much else. 

I take you home. I take you home because you’re standing wavering in the cold, just outside the door to the public bar. You’ve got your head up to the sky and your cheeks are red and you’re mumbling something under your breath. I put you on the couch, and the next morning you tell me that your name is Withnail, and would I like to buy an upper?

You lie languid on my couch, oblivious to everything but your hangover and your self-dramatisations, and I know that I won’t be able to stay away. Your cheekbones are sharp and your fingers are long and drama school taught you everything except how to deal with failure. You’ve always had everything, and now that you’ve got nothing you languish in it.

...

The ungrateful bitch threw me out, you say, throwing half a pint of cider down your throat at once. Considering that ninety percent of your daily activity consists of screaming at your agent in phone boxes, drinking, and trying to wheedle money from your father, I’m, not surprised. My lease is ending and the set dresser wants to find a better flat.

We decide to move in together. During that first manic month, when the flat is still livable and you’re even up for a couple of auditions, I lay awake at night with my heartbeat a triphammer in my ears, trying to work out whether it was the best or the worst decision I ever made. It’s a creaky staircase and four rooms riddled with rising damp and cockroaches, but it’s our home.

You decide to make cheese on toast at five in the morning. You leave the bathroom door open as you take hour-long baths, so you can hear the radio. You throw teacups at the rats. I wonder why I’m here, a passive audience to your self-destruction. When we can afford it, I’m too drunk to care.

...

Danny is yours. All I know is that a week after you move in with a single leather suitcase and a cardboard box full of yellowed scripts and warped books, Danny appears one day at the door. You won’t tell me where you met him, but you fight like old friends, like old enemies. Danny does have friends, and neither do you, really. You have audiences, people to watch you strut back and forth, watch you rant and recite. People to help you up the stairs.

As soon as Danny starts spending the afternoons on our broken-backed couch, I know we’re lost. He has hollow eyes that always show white around the iris, edged with kohl and sleepless nights. He smells of patchouli and hash. 

You knock on my door in the middle of the night, convinced that you’ve given yourself a brain tumour. I run a bath and you read the headlines from the News of the World. You’re too addled to read the articles. You’ll be twenty-nine in a week. You haven’t had any work for six months. You’re sitting in the flat slowly flushing out your nervous system with drink and drugs. 

Later on you knock on my door again, quietly, your bare feet soft on the floor. You wriggle under the covers, your skin warm and clean from the bath. Shhh, I say, shhhh. 

...

I come home to find you slumped over in the corner, against the wall, in the place where my television was before you sold it to a man in a pub for five quid and a couple of crumbly black beauties that kept us up for two days, drinking terrible red wine and listening to the white noise coming from the radio. 

I feel terrible, you tell me. Something’s gone terribly wrong. Your face looks like old porridge and the flat is so cold I can see my breath. The antique wallpaper is peeling and the carpet is freckled and splotched like the mould floating on an old cup of coffee. Everything is falling down around us, and your best solution is to buy more wine.

You’ve got a schoolboy’s copy of Henry V closed on one finger, the pages coming loose from the binding. I pick it up and leaf through it and see that you’ve blocked out your name from the front. Presented to ____ Withnail, it says, your name and your achievement nothing but black. 

I help you up and you rant to me about how your agent expects you to do a moved reading of a terrible modern play by some stuck-up little prat from RADA. I can tell you’re jealous. I make us both a cup of tea and we sip lukewarm tomato soup, huddling around the radiator, talking about the things we’ll buy when we finally get a part. Biff in Death of a Salesman, a new pair of boots. A nice juicy part on a medical drama, a new suit. A hardened criminal on The Bill, a flat without holes in the walls. 

...

Sometimes I think your greatest skill is lying. Why did you become an actor, I wonder. Was it because you were a liar first, because you were beaten and bullied for being evasive and flamboyant, until that and ambition was all that was left? I want to know what you were like as a child, before drink amplified everything harsh in your personality. You would have be believe you came into being bitter and fully-grown, a glass of wine in your hand. 

I’ll have you known that I’m an up-and-coming actor, you slur to the man behind the bar. I demand treatment befitting my station. Your hands are shaking and you smell of dried sweat and brilliantine. 

We’re thinking of redecorating, you say to our landlady, your eyes wet and rimmed with red. We’ve kept the flat in perfect condition, but I shall ask you to stay away for the moment, as my flatmate needs the rest. You shut the door and kick an empty wine bottle to one side. That’ll hold her off for another month, you say. I’m smoking a joint and my cheeks ache from the effort of not laughing. 

I hope we don’t get any more rats, you say as you poor yourself a glass of wine, your voice remote and disinterested.

You’re haughty and tense and passive-aggressive and unpredictable, but I love you and I don’t know why. That’s why I stay until I can't handle it any more. 

...

Come with me, you say to me at three am on a Monday morning. We’re going for a drive.

You don’t know how to drive, I say. 

That’s never stopped me before, you say, your cheeks red and your eyes flashing. We’ll get away from this fucking mess, this seething mass of people with their twinsets and their cafes and their overdrawn tea. Their bell-bottomed trousers and their hair and their _fucking_ shitty commercials for second-rate scotch. 

You were up for a reading last week. You came back drunk.

We get as far as the street before you change your mind. We can never leave, you say. We’re a part of this now. Light us up a joint, will you. You cough wetly. You place your arm around my neck, your cheek hot and feverish against mine. Will we never be set free? Will _I_ never be set free?

...

They’ll knock down the flat eventually. That’s the only way to get rid of the misery and madness ground into the walls. And I leave you there, because I can’t stand it any more. The head-crushing hangovers, the highs so soaring and vast you swear to me that you’ll never come down again. I forget what words mean. I forget why this has happened to me. I forget that I ever moved to London to become an actor. 

And then I leave, because I know you never will, because I know that nothing means anything to you. Not my life or yours. You’re amoral, but the world is amoral. You’re a drunk, but suburban mothers are getting by on Valium and speed. Both of us were sinking, but I’ve left you behind. 

I come around and see you, three weeks into the run. My hair is cut short and the sixties are over. 

You’re very thin. You’re reciting Shakespeare at the ceiling. How does it feel to have made it, you ask me? 

Not as good as I thought it would, I say, but it’s nice to have a television again, and instead of speaking we sit in the wet sloshing silence, listening to the whine of the radio in the next room.


End file.
